ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 59
How do we create more and more settings where people are able to bring their best selves?
So I’ll give you a very specific example just to ground it. So this morning 7:30am my call was
with the director of a local public agency. And the debate he and I were having is one that
will be very familiar to you. We’re forming a steering committee for the implementation of a
local neighborhood initiative. I’m going to be co-chairing the steering committee, along with
a pastor in the community who is ideal for this purpose. And then the debate is, it would be
ideal to have a resident of the neighborhood as the third co-chair. The problem is that there’s
really only one resident who is ready to play that role and she is a longtime community
leader, has anointed herself as the gatekeeper for the neighborhood, and she has alienated
everybody else. And her voice dominates. And she’s been at it for years.
She is an incredible human being who has been through so much trauma and
pain and just gives and gives and gives. And she wants so badly for there to be other leaders
to step up in our community. And she doesn’t understand that she’s
part of the problem for why they aren’t stepping up. And I’ve been on a five year
journey with her, we’re building really good, trusting relationship.
So this initiative is literally going to live or die with if we can figure out how to help this
gatekeeper on her journey to learn to lead while not crowding out others - we have
to get there. And I have to love her to bring her best self in a way that makes space for
others to bring their best selves. That’s the part of the formula that is broken.
Her loving the community has shut out other leaders and now the head of the public agency
is insisting that we make her the co chair because he is coming from a political position that
if you don’t make her a co-chair she’s going to undermine this thing. And he’s right. And it’s a
little bit of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You put her the co-chair now you have
empowered her in a position where she will feel she has been appropriately respected,
but if we do we have to support her to lead in a whole new way. Can we really do it?
So we have to go with her co-chairing the steering committee and I am just going to have
to be right there with her, before, after, and during every meeting asking: ‘How’d we do with
loving folks in this work today?’ With me coaching her and her coaching me.
—Mark Joseph
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